RetroPi vs Recalbox

Personally for me it all depends on choice and preference. Both are good in their own ways. Both run Retroarch and Emulationstation. So not much of a difference. But there are some features that only RetroPi has and some that only Recalbox has.

One important thing to remember is that it is recommended to use USB drive or stick instead of Micro SD Card because SD cards seem to get corrupted over time. But as long as you make a backup, it shouldn’t be a big deal. I suggest you get one of the following:

This might come with your raspberry pi. If you need one, my suggestion is you get HDMI 2.0 with gold plated one (for good conductivity) and preferably grey or white (to match with the pi case!) I recommend the following:

Extras

USB Switch – Adds simplicity to your setup. Make sure you get the usb one and NOT the micro usb one as all the switches that I’ve found is black in color. We don’t want to have a black wire running from the pi to the power outlet.

Bluetooth / Wired Controller – I prefer 8bitdo NES30 Pro Bluetooth Controller as it looks classic with our pi setup. But, you can also use Playstation 4 controller if you have one at home. If you decide to go with PS4 controller then we might have to tweak the code a bit.

Things to do in Raspberry PI 3

1. Insert your Micro SD Card into Raspberry PI 3 and connect your HDMI to TV and Micro USB Cable to your power outlet. It is recommended that you use dedicated adapter instead of TV’s inbuilt USB port for power supply into your Raspberry PI.

2. Your Pi should boot into Recalbox Setup and install the OS automatically! As easy as 1-2-3!

3. After everything is done, you will enter the Emulationstation Screen where you will have some default ROMs that you can test it out. You are ready for some retro-awesomeness!!

Loading Emulationstation

Recalbox Main Screen

Now onto how to configuring your Bluetooth or Wired Controller

Controller Configuration

For the initial setup I suggest you have a keyboard with you as we will need it to configure wifi and other settings. Also I highly recommend you use a Wired USB controller for initial setup. You can use USB cable if you have 8bitdo wireless controller.

Go ahead and connect your wired USB Controller (8bitdo, PS4 or XBox controller will work just fine). Once detected you will see an on-screen popup that will ask you to press and hold a key on your controller.

Controller Detected

Then just go through your controller key mapping setup process. That’s it! You can now play all the retro games.

Map Controller Keys

Bluetooth Controller Setup

To add a bluetooth controller, set your controller in pairing mode.

Go to the menu with wired controller or a keyboard and select Controller Settings.

A list of detected controllers will appear. Select your controller from the list pair it. That’s it! You can configure it if it’s not already a supported controller!

Bluetooth Pairing

Note: When mapping keys, the HOTKEY is a button that will activate buttons combination. For example, to get out of a game into the Emulationstation main menu screen you must press HOTKEY and START button at the same time.

If your recalbox doesn’t automatically connect to wifi just go ahead and restart. Make sure you use 2.4GHz connection as the RPi3 does not support 5GHz connection.

Once connected, it should show the status as connected in Network Settings.

Recalbox Upgrade

The latest stable verison of Recalbox OS release that you can download, as of today, is 4.0.1 but 4.0.2 update is already out. So, the first thing I would recommend you to do after wifi and controller setup is the OS update.

Go to the main menu and to the System Settings

System Settings Menu

In System Settings go to Updates

Updates Menu

And, make sure the Auto Updates feature is set to on. Go to Start Update and follow on screen instructions. It will ask you for a system reboot. Go ahead and hit OK.

Reboot Screen

This might take couple of minutes and should update to 4.0.2.

Root Access to Recalbox using SSH

The default username and password for Recalbox is

Username: root

Password: recalboxroot

Make sure you have putty installed in your computer (look into the zip file you downloaded).

Goto Network Settings in your Recalbox.

Network Settings Recalbox

Look for the IP Addresss. It should say something like 192.168.1.121.

Putty

In putty, under hostname type in this ip address. Make sure the port number is set to 22. Click the Open button.

You should see a terminal screen that asks for username and password. Type the username and password as above.

Recalbox Putty SSH

If it asks to add your login to known hosts file. Type ‘yes’ and hit enter.

You now have the root access!

Installing Themes

In order to install themes, make sure you have the Recalbox Theme folder ready from above.

Network

Open your Network from your PC. If you can’t see Recalbox in there then you will have to go through the FTP route as in my case. I couldn’t see the share folder in there so had to use FTP Client like FileZilla.

Folder Options

Before you do that, make sure you can see all hidden files. Just go to folder options and make sure Show hidden files, folders, and drives is turned on.

FileZilla SSH FTP

Open your favorite FTP client like FileZilla and use the same credentials as above to FTP into Recalbox using SSH.

Navigate to \\recalbox\share\system\.emulationstation\themes on your network

Copy the themes you want to use on your recalbox from recalbox-themes-master/themes/ (zip file above)

Simplicity Theme

Comic Theme

DARKADE Theme

And Select the theme from the UI Settings in Main Menu in Recalbox and restart your pi. That’s it!

Main Menu

UI Setttings

Adding ROMs in Recalbox

Just like installing themes, go to \\recalbox\share\

You will see a folder named ROMs and inside it you will see all the supported systems.

Just copy your game ROMs to the respective folders.

Scraping Artwork and Game Information

On your Recalbox Main Menu go to Scraper

Scraper

Scrape From Source

On scraper window select the scraper source(from). And start scraping! This will add beautiful artwork and game images into each games you have.

Scraping Progress

If it gives you multiple option to choose from for a game artwork, select the one that best fits the name and press A key (or any other key that selects the option).

Backup your Recalbox

This is just a precautionary step. Once you setup everything you might want to make a backup copy of a working OS. Just go ahead and use Win32DiskImager to create an .img backup of your SD Card / USB device.

Win32DiskImager

Connect your USB/SD Card to your PC and Open Win32DiskImager

Give your backup a name in the Image File section and select your device from the drop down list

Click on the Read button and this should create a backup file in your PC.

Troubleshooting

Audio Issues When using PS4 Controller

The PS4 controllers have an integrated audio module that prevents the broadcast of sound on your tv, or speaker. You need to blacklist audio module.

Just recently, I got a Kindle Fire HD 8.9 with LTE for very cheap price from Woot.com, one of amazon.com companies. My idea is that once you own a product, you should be able to do whatever you want. Sure it does void warranty and you might not be able to get it replaced/repaired but for a very cheap tablet I decided to take that risk. This tablet has a lot of potential given the LTE connection but because of the restricted OS that amazon has, we generally can’t do much outside of Amazon ecosystem when it comes to apps.

This tablet in particular uses Android 4.0.4, one of the KitKat versions and is considered a legacy system or OS. It was really hard to find a good solution to root and change things especially when most of the links out there no longer work and the codes were not maintained well. So in this tutorial I will try my best to provide you with all the links and downloads that are available to root your device and install latest TWRP and some custom roms.

Important: I am personally not liable if something goes wrong in the process. It’s up to you to take the risk!

Make sure the “Allow Installation of Applications from Unknown Sources” is turned On

Go back and select Security

Make sure the “Enable ADB” is turned On

Achieve Root Access

Getting a root access on this device is relatively easy. You just have to install the latest version of KingRoot app and try the root process. If it fails, just uninstall the app, restart the tablet, install the app and try again. Now, I have heard couple of bad things about KingRoot. It shows as threat when scanning with AVG app and says that it is a kind of an adware. But I have not found any other good rooting method that actually works. There are other apps like KingRoot but all of these apps seems to come from China 🙂 So it’s up to you to decide.

Make sure you have adb running. Just run this command in your cmd or terminal as an administrator. Your backup files should be available to you in C: drive under KFHD89 folder.

Installing Unlocked Bootloader, TWRP and Custom ROM

Since this tablet uses a legacy OS it was really hard to find the proper flashing tool to flash Recovery partition. The only apk that seems to work is called FireFlash. Also you do need the TWRP image to flash into the recovery partition.

Important: Amazon OS seems to delete the Recovery partition every time you reboot the device (or keep it in stand-by mode for a long period of time)

What you need:

FireFlash 1.1 APK

Unlocked Bootloader image file

TWRP image file

Go ahead and follow these steps:

Install the FireFlash APK and open it

Make sure you select (as shown in the image below)

Flash kfh8-u-boot-prod-8.1.4.bin (check the box) it will have some red text below saying your tablet doesn’t have 8.1.4. If not, it means you already have 8.1.4 bin and you will not be able to check the check box which is all right.

It should now show a popup saying Flashing and complete the flash process

You will see a report window when done. Go ahead and hit ok.

Now immediately, tap on the Reboot into recovery button. This is important because Amazon OS tends to wipe the recovery partition from time-to-time.

Your tablet will restart and you will see Kindle Fire logo with the text Fire in red color. You should now boot into Recovery Mode with TWRP.

If for some reason you restart or decide to go to recovery mode later, just flash the recovery partition with recovery auto update disabled using FireFlash and reboot into recovery.

To know that your bootloader is unlocked, whenever you restart your tablet you’ll see Kindle Fire logo with Fire text in blue color.

Install Custom ROM

In order to install custom ROMs, make sure you have the correct rom that supports your device. It is usually in a .zip format. Once you choose the ROM that you want, just boot into recovery and in TWRP select the zip file and flash it. Make sure to wipe data, cache and davlik to restore to factory settings.

Now I heard that ROM from LiquidSmooth (they closed a while ago) is the best ROM out there for Kindle Fire HD 8.9 (both LTE and non-LTE) but I couldn’t find it anywhere. It should have been available here as LS-KK-MileStone-3.2-jem.zip for non-LTE device and LS-KK-MileStone-3.2-jemlte.zip for LTE device, but the links don’t work. So if anyone come across this ROM please do let me know. I’ll host it somewhere so that others can download. For now, I prefer to stick to stock OS as that is by far the best os for this device but will have a root so that I can install launchers that need root access.

Troubleshoot using Fastboot Command

If anything fails or you are stuck in bootloop, there is still a chance that you can fully recover your device. Make sure you have fastboot running in pc/mac and you have a backup of all your partitions as mentioned above. Now to go to a stock firmware all you need to do is shut the tablet down, open up command prompt(cmd) in Windows or terminal in Mac and do the following:

Fastboot Flash Boot Partition

Shell

1

fastboot-i0x1949flash boot stock-boot.img

Type this and hit enter it should say <waiting for device> and then go ahead and plug your device into your pc/mac. This should flash your boot image.

Fastboot Flash Recovery Partition

Shell

1

fastboot-i0x1949flash recovery stock-recovery.img

Type this and hit enter. (Now if it doesn’t do anything and is stuck. Take the USB cable out and plug it in again. Type the code above and hit enter. Do the same for the following codes.)

Fastboot Flash System Partition

Shell

1

fastboot-i0x1949flash system stock-system.img

Type this and hit enter. It will take a while. Once done type the following.